Written by Dr. Jeffery J Ventrella |
Wednesday, March 20, 2024
Worshipping the State is not inevitable; trashing the State is not inevitable. Rather, with moral clarity, moral conviction, and moral courage, Christians can—and should—seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, including public righteousness,  rendering to Caesar those things—and only those things—which are his.

We have no king but Caesar[1]
Especially those of Caesar’s household[2]
Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s[3]
God the Creator is a God of purpose, design, and order. His Creation is structured and ordered[4] and He requires the collective conduct of those worshipping Him to be done “decently and in order.”[5] What about society in general beyond the ecclesiastical realm? Here’s a hint: After liberating His enslaved people, God gave them law to structure and order society.[6] Liberty evidently requires order and structure, not radical autonomy with unfettered “freedom,”[7] or anarchy. This raises the question: What is the role of the State? If Caesar is the only king, should Caesar be functionally imbued with God-like attributes reaching, regulating, and even redeeming every crevice of society?  Alternatively, if Caesar is not the only king, should Christians just ignore or even despise the State? How should we view the State and its role today? Is it Savior, Suspect, or Servant? Lies that live distort the answers to these questions. Let’s get to the gist.
The State as Savior?
No pious Christian would ever crassly confess that the State is Savior; only Christ is savior, Yet, our conduct can often betray our confession. Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine a disaster, any disaster: Hurricane, tornado, wildfire, floods, pandemic, et al – anytime these occur, the knee jerk reaction functionally looks to the State to remedy the situation. And, even when not facing an emergent situation – education, health care, housing, poverty, inflation, social media, et al, the “first call” for solving societal issues seems to be the State, and in reality, its taxpayers.
Increasingly, the gut reaction of many citizens looks to the State to fix things. This reaction, however, is based on a lie for several reasons. First, the nature of the State is coercive; it bears the power of the sword.[8] Put in more concrete terms: What do we really want officials with guns and bazookas to do? Accordingly, whatever the State touches will be subject to coercion; its only operative mode is inherently coercive. If this power is not defined and confined, it will, over time, reduce citizens to being subjects, restricting or eliminating liberty to innovate and otherwise flourish. When this occurs, the cultural mandate is stunted, undermining one of man’s purposes.[9] Dictatorships may profit select individuals, but rarely, if ever, do they prosper a people as a whole: compare North Korea with South Korea.
Second, the State can never possess sufficient power and knowledge to salvifically regulate a nation into prosperity, let alone righteousness. To think otherwise embraces a utopian delusion and lives a lie. A State may gain or acquire significant power, but that power—no matter how significant—can never rival the Gospel’s power to rescue, heal, and save. It alone is the “power of God for salvation to everyone.”[10]
And, even setting aside the State’s lack of power for generating eternal consequences, the State lacks both efficient and sufficient knowledge to make viable temporal differences concerning human action and economics.[11] Managed economies are always mediocre economies doomed with persistent shortages, wide inflationary swings, and higher unemployment. The fundamental lie here is that it mis-orders the nature of productivity: Production must precede Consumption, not vice versa which all Keynesian managed solutions impose.[12]
When the State is viewed as Savior and deploys its coercive power to impose price controls, rent control, crony capitalistic deals, tariffs, wage regulation, taxes, etc., based on this lie, economies—and human flourishing—diminishes. As we shall see, the State cannot save even temporally because it was never designed nor purposed to save. Yet, recognizing this truth often leads to another enslaving lie: maybe the State should be viewed not through utopian glasses as Savior, but through a cynical lens, as a necessary evil. Christians are told to reject and avoid the State since “politics is dirty,” always viewing the State with suspicion, cynicism, and skepticism.
The State as Suspect?
Maybe this quip only appeals to legal and political nerds, but it illustrates a point:
Did you hear about the Libertarian’s proposal to revise the 1stAmendment?Here’s the new language: “Congress shall make no law PERIOD!”
The idea here is that the State should do next to nothing; in fact some Libertarians actually believe in nearly zero State action.[13] The assumption is that the State lacks competency or even moral illegitimacy for protecting and structuring ordered liberty. Libertarians instead believe that the unfettered market best orders society and solves its coordination problems. Libertarians are half right.
First, as the next section will show, the Biblical truth is that the State is both legitimate and limited – so far so good. However, while Scripture presupposes the morality of liberty-based markets,[14] it is the virtuous market that Scripture embraces. Saying “markets are good” is not to say “all markets are good.” Unconstrainted markets such as those that Libertarians promote, operate to feed sinful man’s appetites. In other words, there always will be markets, that is, demand, for bad things that compromise or undermine human flourishing and ordered liberty: drugs, gambling, sex trafficking, child pornography, contract murder, fencing stolen property, stealing or forging art masterpieces[15], medically mutilating and disfiguring children presenting with gender dysphoria[16], et al. Relying solely on markets absent a moral compass ultimately leads to systematizing moral weakness and corruption.
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How easily we can overlook our own ability to bring the Word of God to bear in our daily interactions. What if we thought more deeply about our beliefs, responsibilities, and everyday choices as we dwell together before a watching world? We are resident foreigners with an eternal citizenship in heaven (1 Peter 2:11). Remembering this divine reality changes the way we interact on earth. Imagine how mighty a witness we would be as countless thousands of Christians deploy into the culture every single day with one visual in mind: We are a city on a hill.

Let’s not be surprised. The world is a dark place, and attacks on Christianity by our culture are in abundant supply. A quick scroll through your social media feed or a fifteen-minute segment of the evening news will prove that. While some might say, “It’s worse than ever!” we must admit that somewhere in the world it’s always been like this. Jesus put it this way when preparing His own disciples for His departure: “In this world you will have tribulation” (John 16:33).
As Christians, it’s more than likely that our faith in Christ will bring us attacks, slander, workplace discrimination, and the loss of friends and opportunities. In the midst of such treatment, there is a temptation to fight fire with fire. But what if we saw times like these as a great opportunity to be a witness? What if our most powerful witness was found in using weapons of warfare that look nothing like the culture’s? As Christians, we are the light of the world. We are a city on a hill (Matt. 5:14). But how can light be light when it looks like the darkness?
The Apostle Paul was no stranger to trouble and dealing with difficult people, yet he continued to encourage the church to preserve its witness in the midst of a wicked culture. “Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person” (Col. 4:5–7). These words were penned by the same Paul who was slandered by false teachers and had his integrity questioned in Corinth (2 Cor. 10–11). Yet, Paul continued to make every effort to guard his witness by proclaiming the truth and walking with integrity. His heart was wide open to the church (6:11), he exemplified his own words to “owe no one anything” but to love others (Rom. 13:8), and he poured his life out as a drink offering (2 Tim. 4:6). He was a wonderful example of truth and integrity. How can we maintain our witness in today’s culture? By reflecting the character of Him to whom we bear witness.
The enemy’s strategy has not changed. Darkness will stop at nothing in tempting you to behave like the world in times like these.
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In other words, faith justifies, and the various “other saving graces” that accompany it come into view in sanctification with its operation of the Spirit in which he “infuses grace” per Larger Catechism Q. 77. It is not an accurate summary to say that there is an infused habit of faith that is first passive in justification but then subsequently active in sanctification, when the confessions appealed to actually distinguish between the saving grace of justifying faith (Q. 72) and the other saving graces that accompany it (Q. 73; Conf. 11.2).

Credo, the organ of the movement to normalize scholasticism among evangelicals, has pursued an interesting career as of late. When it has not been praising the alleged glories of Platonism, giving space to people who regard the Reformation as a tragedy to be lamented, or interviewing the presidents of organizations whose faculty and contributors include female pastors, it has found time to cast aspersions at contemporary evangelicals for “cutting ourselves off from Thomas” and suffering, as a consequence, “from a theology that looks more modern than orthodox.”
Of particular interest is an article by J.V. Fesko asserting that the acceptance of Thomas Aquinas is a sort of litmus test for whether one may be deemed a bona fide Protestant. To be told that we are under obligation to embrace any Romanist in order to be considered Protestant is intriguing enough, but to hear that we must do so concerning the preeminent medieval scholastic and the man whom Protestants have historically understood to be among the foremost expositors of those ideas which so corrupted the Western church that she fell into that ‘Babylonian captivity’ from whence part of Christendom escaped only with great suffering – well, that makes for quite a large pill to swallow. To think that those who have justified our murder[1] and commended the religious veneration of images of Christ and of his cross[2] should be rejected as false teachers is, on Prof. Fesko’s view, only enough to make us “self-professed Protestants,” and such assertions are only so much “noisy din” and engaging in “cancel culture theology.”
Central to Prof. Fesko’s assertions is his belief that previous generations of Protestants employed a “nuanced approach to the thought of Aquinas” in which, for example, they “excised the problematic teachings of infused righteousness as it relates to justification but retained Thomas’ teaching on infused habits for the doctrine of sanctification.” As evidence Prof. Fesko says that John Owen “took a nuanced approach to Aquinas’s doctrine of justification,” especially as regards the concept of an infused habit of righteousness. He quotes Owen’s The Doctrine of Justification by Faith as proof when it speaks of “an habitual infused habit of Grace which is the formal cause of our personal inherent Righteousness,” but which is yet distinct from the “formal cause” of our justification, the imputation of Christ’s righteousness.
The edition Prof. Fesko has quoted is available here. Owen mentions Thomas a single time and says this:
It is therefore to no purpose to handle the mysteries of the Gospel, as if Holcot and Bricot, Thomas and Gabriel, with all the Sententiarists, Summists, and Quodlibetarians of the old Roman Peripatetical School, were to be raked out of their Graves to be our guides. Especially will they be of no use unto us, in this Doctrine of Justification. For whereas they pertinaciously adhered unto the Philosophy of Aristotle, who knew nothing of any Righteousness, but what is an habit inherent in our selves, and the Acts of it, they wrested the whole Doctrine of Justification unto a compliance therewithall.
Such strong language and complete rejection can hardly be called taking a “nuanced approach to Aquinas’s doctrine of justification.” When Prof. Fesko, commenting upon the passage he had quoted, then asks:
How does Owen hold the concepts of imputed and infused righteousness together? How does he blend this Thomist category of the infused habit of righteousness together with the Reformation teaching of justification by the imputed righteousness of Christ?
We may fairly reply that he doesn’t: the passage from Justification by Faith Fesko quotes proves that Owen and other Protestant theologians vigorously distinguish between imputed and infused righteousness. It is noteworthy as well that the word “infused” appears a mere two times among Justification by Faith’s approximately 208,000 words.[3] “Imputed” appears 305 times and “imputation” some 429 times. The notion of an infused habit is not prominent, then, by any stretch of the imagination; if anything, it is, as the context of the excerpt Fesko quoted also shows, a mere passing thought, at least in this particular work.
Curiously, Fesko does not answer his own question with a further appeal to Owen’s works but by shifting to the position of the Westminster Assembly (which Owen did not attend). To this end he appeals to the Westminster Confession (11.1-2, 14.2) and Larger Catechism (Q. 77), and he believes he finds in them “the language of infused habits” which “the divines continue to employ” in Q. 75 of the Larger Catechism, which speaks of the sanctified as “having the seeds of repentance unto life, and all other saving graces, put into their hearts, and those graces so stirred up, increased, and strengthened, as that they more and more die unto sin, and rise unto newness of life.” Prof. Fesko believes that the description of Questions 75 and 77 (“in sanctification his Spirit infuseth grace”) “sounds a lot like Aquinas’s doctrine of justification as the believer increases in righteousness, but the difference here is that this growth does not factor in justification, which rests entirely upon Christ’s imputed righteousness.”
Before proceeding to Prof. Fesko’s other remarks in this section, let it be noted that in B.B. Warfield’s analysis of the Westminster Assembly and its products there is a single reference to Aquinas, and even there on a point of logic and regarding the completeness of Scripture.[4] That work is not an absolute catalogue of the minutes, admittedly, but if Aquinas were such a large presence in the thought of the Westminster divines we might expect that to show in a work such as Warfield’s. In addition, note that the phrase “habit” appears nowhere in the Westminster Confession or Catechisms and that “infuse” (in its various forms) appears in the Westminster Confession a single time in 11.1, cited by Prof. Fesko, in which it is said that “Those whom God effectually calleth, he also freely justifieth: not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins” (emphasis mine). Returning to Prof. Fesko’s remarks, he ends the paragraph in question by saying this:
In justification the infused habit of faith is passive but in sanctification it is active. What Aquinas conflates Owen and the Westminster divines distinguish. Even though they distinguish justification and sanctification, they nevertheless maintain they are inseparably joined together.
While we are on the topic of conflation, note carefully Prof. Fesko’s words (especially his first sentence) and how they compare to those of the passages he cites and his earlier statements. Larger Catechism Question 77, the only Westminster statement to positively employ the language of infusion, says that in sanctification the Spirit infuses grace, not a “habit of faith.” Sanctification follows justification, so the grace that the Spirit is said to infuse then is distinct from the faith which factors in justification.
This is proved as well by Westminster Confession 11.2, quoted previously by Fesko, which says that “Faith . . . is the alone instrument of justification; yet is it not alone in the person justified, but is ever accompanied with all other saving graces.” In other words, faith justifies, and the various “other saving graces” that accompany it come into view in sanctification with its operation of the Spirit in which he “infuses grace” per Larger Catechism Q. 77. It is not an accurate summary to say that there is an infused habit of faith that is first passive in justification but then subsequently active in sanctification, when the confessions appealed to actually distinguish between the saving grace of justifying faith (Q. 72) and the other saving graces that accompany it (Q. 73; Conf. 11.2). (The question of when, and to what extent, faith is best described as passive or active is one we will not engage here.)
And as for the fact that the Westminster divines and Owen distinguish what Aquinas conflates, it may be asked how exactly that proves anything for Fesko’s case. That the respective parties have different perspectives upon sanctification and justification has nothing to do with the question of whether the former got a concept of infused habits from the latter.
Fesko also appeals to the Canons of Dort’s explicit mention of faith as being infused. Yet here too the question arises as to whether the similarity in terms between Aquinas and Protestants arises because the latter are borrowing from the former: perhaps Dort’s divines borrowed the concept of infused faith unknowingly or got it from other sources? That is an academic question which we have neither the space nor the inclination to answer here, but whether or not Fesko’s basic assertion is correct, he fails to make the case in this article. Such evidence as he provides is circumstantial at best and can be sufficiently explained by other theories absent further evidence. Mere coincidence or reception from other sources is at least as probable on the thin evidence (if such it is) that Fesko gives here. When he states that Owen, Dort, and Westminster “plied Aquinas’s insights” he is therefore coming to a conclusion that is not warranted and which other material in his sources makes seem highly doubtful. Consider again Owen’s mention of Aquinas above, as well as the fact that the Synod of Dort also rebuked the Franeker professor Maccovius for his use of the Romanist scholastics Suarez and Bellarmine.[5]
Fesko asserts two benefits of “the concept of an infused habit.” First, “infused habits help us distinguish between natural human ability from [sic] those abilities given by the grace of God in salvation.” But one can do such a thing without the concept of infused habits, for example by saying that natural morality is a result of God’s common grace, whereas sanctification comes from his saving grace. It is not clear that the language of infused habits does anything that cannot be done just as well otherwise. When Fesko states that “acknowledging that a capacity for holiness and righteousness is infused is another way of saying that it is the gift of God” we can reply: ‘why not just say that a capacity for righteousness is the gift of God, then, and spare your readers the scholastic terminology and the confusion it is likely to engender?’
Second, Fesko claims that “the infused habit of faith establishes a conceptual context for a theology of virtue,” to which the same objections apply. One can simply say that true virtue pleasing to God is his own gift and arises because of our new nature in Christ and the operations of the Spirit in us as we work out our salvation.
In conclusion, consider the sheer absurdity of Fesko’s position. He belittles his living brethren for the sake of trying to lay claim to the heritage of a dead Romanist who would regard him as a heretic who should be put to death. In this we see a fine example of how theologians have a bad tendency to get carried away in their speculations and researches, and how they tend to lose sight of the practical matters entailed in serving Christ. Be very careful whom you read, dear reader, for “bad company ruins good morals” (1 Cor. 15:33) and “much study is a weariness of the flesh” (Ecc. 12:12). You do not need to tackle Aquinas’s many words (the Summa Theologica in PDF is over 9,400 pages) or his excruciating prose, nor sift through his various erroneous doctrines in order to be a faithful servant of Christ, whose yoke is by contrast light and easy (Matt. 11:28-30), and whose word is sufficient for all you need in order to know him and to abound in virtue (Ps. 19; 119; 2 Tim. 3:16-17; 2 Pet. 1:5-8).
Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Simpsonville, S.C.

[1] Summa Theologica, IIaIIae Q.11, Art. 3
[2]Summa Theologica, IIIa, Q. 25, Art. 3 and 4
[3] “Infusion” appears 25 times, but often while discussing the position of Rome.
[4] The Westminster Assembly and Its Work by B.B. Warfield, p. 206, quoting the position of George Gillespie expressed in one of his writings.
[5]H. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, Vol. I, p. 181
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